Out In The Midday Sun by Elspeth Huxley

Author:Elspeth Huxley [Huxley, Elspeth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781446475812
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-06-08T04:00:00+00:00

If you wanted to explore the mountain, the man to guide you was Raymond Hook, brother of the Commander – naturally called Boat Hook – who kept the Silverbeck hotel. Both were sons of the painter Bryan Hook, who in 1912 had travelled in East Africa with his son Raymond and his eldest daughter, and bought some undeveloped land near Nanyuki. Raymond stayed on as a pupil of Delamere’s, soldiered through the East African campaign and then settled on his father’s land, but never seriously farmed it.

He came to know the mountain like the back of his hand. Tall, heavily built, tough as an old boot and with a voice soft as a dove’s, his nature was a curious blend of the gypsy and the don. He lived like a pig, oblivious of squalor and inured to discomfort, yet could quote in the original Greek pages from Homer or Plato, and had made a study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Off he would go up the mountain with a bag of posho, and another of beans, loaded on a mule, with a groundsheet for shelter and a thumbed copy of a Greek classic in his pocket, to disappear for weeks on end. Nothing escaped his eye. Once, Tuppence told me, as they rode through the bush, a tiny mouse shot across the path, visible only for an instant. Without hesitation, he named its genus and species. Another, and less agreeable, memory was of lunching with him in his dwelling, in which animals were just as welcome as humans. Becoming aware of an unpleasant smell, she enquired as to its origin. Raymond Hook replied: ‘Watch where the bluebottles settle.’ They settled in a corner on a stinking mess that proved to be a litter of very dead puppies.

He became an expert at catching wild animals to be shipped off to zoos, a cruel and heartless business as it seems to me. He was the first man to trap a bongo, that shy and secret denizen of the forest, and sent it to the London zoo – the poor caged creature gave birth to a calf on shipboard. Raymond crossed zebras with horses to produce zebroids, and tried to do the same with buffaloes and cattle, but without success. ‘Although he loved his animals,’ I was told, ‘he didn’t look after them properly but adopted a policy that if you had enough of them, it didn’t matter much if half of them died.’8

Cheetahs were a speciality. He lassoed them from horseback on the plains and sold them to zoos and to an Indian Maharajah, who used them for hunting gazelle. Since cheetahs have clocked up speeds of sixty-four miles an hour, almost twice that of the fastest horse, he had to tire them out. This involved galloping at full tilt over terrain riddled by invisible pig-holes.

Raymond Hook took twelve cheetahs to London, intending to match them against greyhounds at the White City, but the managers of the track turned down his proposal. A race

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